Doha – Getting off to a good start, Zulfahmi Khairuddin immediately put in his fastest lap time of the week, initially placing him in sixteenth position. Unable to further improve, the Malaysian rider concluded the session in twenty eighth place.
Pushing to pick up the pace Jakub Kornfeil worked hard to better his time, but struggling with the set-up on his #84 machine was unable to advance, qualifying for tomorrow’s race on row nine.
Johan Stigefelt – Team Manager
“The results of today’s qualifying were definitely not what we were hoping for. At this moment we have to look at the bikes and speak with the riders and work out exactly what is wrong. It has been a difficult day for us as we cannot be this far behind; it is not where we should be. We need to dig deep and get back to where we belong. This is our first qualifying in Moto3 and our performance is disappointing, but we have to move on from this now; refocus and work out how to improve. We must look at all the data, analyse everything and together find the solution. I hope that in Warm Up tomorrow we can find something. For sure it is not going to be easy to start from the back, but the race is many laps. It’s a tough field to get through but there is still a chance for us to claim points here.”
#63 Zulfahmi Khairuddin – Qualifying: P28; 2’08.040 – 14 laps
“Today has been a very difficult day for the team and I. We tried something on the bike and we went faster, but it wasn’t enough, as many of the other riders in the field also bettered their lap times. Now we have a lot of work to do, so we can find the right direction to go in. The team know what they are doing and I believe we can find the answer. Tomorrow we must have a strong start and try to be as soon as possible in the top fifteen.”
#84 Jakub Kornfeil – Qualifying: P26; 2’07.602 – 14 laps
“We have had a disappointing qualification practice today; For sure twenty sixth was not our target. Now all I can do is to try to put this result behind me and not keep it in my head. We changed the setting completely from yesterday in order to find out why we’re not on the pace and today it looks as if this setting can work. Our problem is that we need more time to improve it; we need to go step by step. We know the bike has potential we just need to find the final sixth tenths in Warm Up; if we can do this, for sure we will be competitive in the race. In qualifying we were very fast in the first and second sector but then in the last sector in the fast corners we lost everything, we lost one second, so we need to understand why we are losing so much time here. It is important that we don’t let this result destroy us and that we stay focused. For sure it is going to be a very hard race, but we still have Warm Up tomorrow. In this time it will be our priority not to think about the position but to concentrate on setting up the bike well and to feel confident. Everybody is working very hard to give me the best possible bike and I am happy for this.”
